By Erica C. Barnett
Mayor Bruce Harrell’s budget director, Julie Dingley, resigned this week and is out of next Friday, when she’ll be replaced on an interim basis by Harrell’s policy director Dan Eder. PubliCola first reported the news about Dingley and Eder on X this morning, and Harrell announced it as part of a larger staffing update this afternoon.
Dingley’s departure comes as the mayor’s office and city council prepare to contend with a budget deficit of more than $240 million.
This week, the city council’s central staff released a report revealing that the cost of a new 2021-2023 contract with the Seattle Police Officers Guild, which provides retroactive raises totaling 24 percent over the past three years, will cost the city more than $96 million in 2024 alone, and $39 million in 2025 and 2026, not counting additional raises that the Seattle Police Officers Guild will negotiate as part a contract that will eventually apply retroactively to those years.
Overall, central staff estimates, the 2023 contract will cost about $9.2 million more, over the next three years, than the city has set aside to increase officer pay.
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Harrell also announced his appointment of Natalie Walton-Anderson, City Attorney Ann Davison’s former criminal division chief, as his public safety director. When she left Davison’s office earlier this year, Walton-Anderson said she needed to “take a break and reset after 27 years working in the criminal legal system.”
Walton-Anderson was known for aggressively filing charges in drug-related cases that would ordinarily get channeled into the city’s pre-booking diversion program, LEAD, and Davison credited her with instituting the “high-utilizer initiative,” which targets people accused of multiple misdemeanor offenses for more punitive approaches than other defendants.
Walton-Anderson’s appointment also comes at a time when Harrell is preparing to roll out a new “public safety plan” reportedly focused on drug use downtown, and as the city considers inking a new contract for jail beds with the South Correctional Entity (SCORE), which would allow the city to book people on charges King County generally excludes from booking, such as drug possession and other low-level misdemeanors.
King County ended its own brief contract with the regional jail, which is owned by six South King County cities, last year, citing logistical challenges. Four people died at SCORE last year, including a woman who died of malnutrition and dehydration after spending three nights curled on the floor of a temporary holding cell.